Every morning I tell myself, Today has to be productive — and then something happens that prevents me from writing… Something always happens. Each morning I already know I will be able to waste the whole day. There is always something to do: go to the bank, the post office, pay some bills … always some bureaucratic tangle I have to deal with.

But what’s most interesting is how much the role of the newspaper in Calvino’s life — a medium intended to inform but in this case used to distract — resembles how we tend to use the internet today, down to its addictive nature and our many failed resolutions to wean ourselves off of it:

While I am out I also do errands such as the daily shopping: buying bread, meat, or fruit. First thing, I buy newspapers. Once one has bought them, one starts reading as soon as one is back home — or at least looking at the headlines to persuade oneself that there is nothing worth reading. Every day I tell myself that reading newspapers is a waste of time, but then … I cannot do without them. They are like a drug. In short, only in the afternoon do I sit at my desk, which is always submerged in letters that have been awaiting answers for I do not even know how long, and that is another obstacle to be overcome.

What’s most poignant, of course, isn’t the mere parallel but also the fact that, today, newspapers struggle for their survival precisely because of the internet, which has proven to be an even more unforgiving “drug” for our collective attention. Calvino considers how this has impacted his daily routine:

In theory I would like to work every day. But in the morning I invent every possible excuse not to work: I have to go out, make some purchases, buy the newspaper. As a rule, I manage to waste the morning, so I end up sitting down to write in the afternoon. I’m a daytime writer, but since I waste the morning I’ve become an afternoon writer. I could write at night, but when I do, I don’t sleep. So I try to avoid that.

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